Tagged With: Mushrooms

It’s mushroom season in our back yard. There were a total of five maple trees running in a line through our back yard when we bought the house. One of them, a silver maple (Acer saccharinum) was clearly large enough to be older than the house but the others, I’m pretty sure, were planted about the time the house was built. Three of the five are gone, now. One came down in a storm and I preemptively took two more down, including the largest one, to prevent the same thing happening and it falling on the house. Each year since then, mushrooms appear early in the fall and I have to assume they are living on what remains of the roots of those trees. They appear, flourish, and then turn to mush in about a week. When they become mush, they appear to be devoured by the grubs of some insect or other. It’s pretty gross, actually, but all part of the grand panoply of life.

Do you like mushrooms? Cathy and I both do. Dorothy isn’t a fan so I have to leave them out (or cook them separately) when she is home. Now that she’s back at school, I’m buying them in bulk again. Great Wall Supermarket has big bags of these mushrooms and they go pretty well with just about everything I cook. Tonight that was hamburgers with mushroom gravy. What I really love are porcini (a.k.a. cep, Boletus edulis), which have such a wonderful, earthy flavour. Bought dried in very small packets they are convenient but quite expensive. I really should buy them a pound or two at a time, which brings the price per ounce down quite a bit. I don’t think I’m ready to buy a 25 pound bag, though. Walmart has one listed for $1,048.32. I don’t think so. Sorry.

There is, as the saying goes, a fungus among us. Ever since we cut down the large tree in the center of our back yard we’ve had these mushrooms pop up from time to time. The fungus is there all the time, of course, helping break down the wood in the now dead roots. The mushrooms, the fruiting body of that fungus, appear from time to time to remind us that their job continues. I have no idea if these mushrooms are edible or not. I really should find out because if they are, we could have a fairly easy supply. They appear in variously sized clumps up to almost a foot across but only last a day or two and then they are gone. I didn’t have my glasses on when I was taking these pictures, so I didn’t notice all the little bits of grass, which I would otherwise have picked off. Cathy had just finished cutting the grass but mowed around these so I could get my pictures.

I know I’ve done a lot of mushrooms here relative to other things but I really like this image so I’m posting one more. This is peak mushroom season around here so there are a lot about. This one was in my front yard.